Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow

Re:Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow by biztos on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @08:26AM (#28287883)

I wouldn’t say he’s not contributing, I’d say he doesn’t have employees. Same would be true if he has his “team” on 1099 in the US.

Outside of any moral questions, the risk here is that the government may decide your group of happy startup contractors are in fact employees, and then you’re in for some massively distracting and expensive restructuring (at best) or legal sanctions and maybe losing your team (at worst).

So yeah, it’s easier, but that’s because it’s cheat mode, not because he’s American. You could use any offshore company for the same thing.

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Re:Y Combinator’s European founder intake continues to grow by bingohbangoh on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @11:37AM (#28290262)

There are lots of laws over if your employee is a contractor or full-time. Many, _many_ companies butt heads with local labor boards who decide that a given employee is actually full-time and thus entitled to a bunch of different protections.

Many regulations either don't exist in Europe or are under-enforced. For instance, Germany did not outlaw insider trading until ~2003. There's a strong chance that an American hiring a contractor in, say, Romania will simply not be prosecutable while an American hiring a contractor in America will be. There's some legal term of art for this that I can't recall off-hand.

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